“It’s Bigger on the Inside”

It’s such a shame that many churches don’t even have a high altar and even some that have one don’t have the veil over the tabernacle. It’s such a simple and yet profound reminder that when we celebrate the Mass we are truly out of all time. At the moment of the Agnus Dei, we are transported through time to the crucifixion itself, our Lord is pierced anew for our offenses, and the veil of the Sanctum Sanctorum is split from top to bottom once again.

The account of Josephus describes the entrance to the Temple of Jerusalem in Jesus’ time as being adorned with golden grapevines and there was a table with 12 loaves next to the inner veil leading to the Holy of Holies. The veil itself depicted the heavens and the earth and so not only are we united to the crucifixion with the parting of the veil during Mass, but also to the creation of the universe when God divided the firmament, and also to the end of the world when Jesus will separate the sheep from the goats. What an incredible miracle!

Along similar lines, on the Feast of the Visitation, we are also called to contemplate that the building of a church is literally a womb. Every day (save Good Friday) Christ is not only slain for our sins, but is also reborn in the consecration of the Eucharist. How joyous for the people of God that every day is the Nativity and the Passion all rolled into one! We go through the motions of no bells, no organ, no marking of time during the celebration of the Holy Triduum, but even in Ordinary Time, every Mass is a miraculous journey beyond the temporal realm into the eternal.

Even so, we hear stories about priests who–even today–are removing the veil from altars in the name of the often misguided “spirit of Vatican II.” It’s so sad that anyone would want to dismantle such a beautiful part of the liturgy and, indeed, of our faith. Can we go to heaven if we go to a parish without a high altar and a veil over the tabernacle? Probably yes. But does it deprive us of not just a reminder, but indeed to some degree also the reality of what is taking place? Absolutely. If people really understood what was taking place, perhaps they might approach the Mass with a little more reverence.

I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there is a video that has begun making the rounds of Pope Francis performing what looks like an impromptu deliverance on a young man in a wheelchair. What starts as a blessing turns into something rather terrifying:

Whether you believe that what you are seeing is the Holy Father confronting something demonic in a man, or perhaps just the physical reaction of someone who is ill, it underscores a fundamental and often-overlooked truth: evil exists, Satan is real, and we need help to be freed from his grasp and the chains of our own sinfulness. We cannot do it alone.

It will come as no great surprise to you that I am a sinner. Like all who suffer Adam’s curse, the ravages of concupiscence, and fallen human nature, I am a serial repeat offender. I sin. I repent. I beg God to help me to be stronger. I do better for a while, but then temptation rises when I least expect it and…back to the confessional I go.

It is the sacrament of confession that is the healing balm, that knits the bones of conscience and the wounds of soul. It is confession that makes us feel new, the meager penances we receive that give us confidence that God’s mercy transcends His justice. As we kneel before the crucifix, we are reminded that these sins of ours are bought and paid for, and their reparation can thus be satisfied as easily by three Hail Marys as by a year of fasting.

On the uniqueness and effect of confession, Chesterton wrote:

When people ask me, or indeed anybody else, “Why did you join the Church of Rome?” the first essential answer, if it is partly an elliptical answer, is, “To get rid of my sins.” For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people’s sins. It is confirmed by the logic, which to many seems startling, by which the Church deduces that sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished; and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned.

[...]

[W]hen a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world to a Crystal Palace that is really of crystal. He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man. The accumulations of time can no longer terrify. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.

A pastor of mine once lamented during a homily that the lines for confession were far too short considering how long the lines for communion were. He was right. But that’s a two-way street.

As essential as this sacrament is to a healthy spiritual life and essential Christian living, it is all-too-often hard to find. In many parishes, confessions are available for somewhere between 30-60 minutes on Saturday afternoons, on what is for many families their busiest day of the week. As a father of six, we do much of our house cleaning, errand-running, grocery shopping, and recreational outings as a family on Saturdays. When we’re not doing that, we’re often working, since our family business requires no few weekend hours. Making it to confession on Saturday in the small window allotted is sometimes possible, but rarely without setting some other important task aside.

At the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, confessions are available 35 hours a week. It has often been the case that I have driven there and made my penance, despite the distance, simply because it was so readily available. But the drive is long – two hours round trip – and as we’ve moved further out from the city and I face more responsibilities at work and at home, I make it there less and less frequently.

I often find myself wishing that parishes, too, would offer confessions on weekdays at an hour suitable for office workers to take a lunch break, or in the evenings, so that commuters can stop in and reconcile with God before plunging into their evening routines. In the times during Lent or Advent when confessions have at times been made more widely available on weekdays, I’ve nearly always taken advantage of it.

If you offer it, we will come.

I know that priests are busy too. Parishes are often under-staffed and dioceses across the country have faced a vocation shortage over the years. But our world is steeped in darkness, and Confession is a profound weapon to bring light into people’s lives. St. John Vianney is said to have heard confessions for as many as 18 hours a day, with pilgrims coming from all around to receive his unique gift – the ability to read souls, to see their true state, to identify sins left unconfessed.  I have been to his little parish in Ars, and I must say that for people to have traveled so far to such an unremarkable place, the man himself must have been very remarkable indeed. And surely, he saw the true value of confession. He wrote:

My children, we cannot comprehend the goodness of God towards us in instituting this great Sacrament of Penance. If we had had a favour to ask of Our Lord, we should never have thought of asking Him that. But He foresaw our frailty and our inconstancy in well-doing, and His love induced Him to do what we should not have dared to ask. If one said to those poor lost souls that have been so long in Hell, “We are going to place a priest at the gate of Hell: all those who wish to confess have only to go out, ” do you think, my children, that a single one would remain? The most guilty would not be afraid of telling their sins, nor even of telling them before all the world. Oh, how soon Hell would be a desert, and how Heaven would be peopled! Well, we have the time and the means, which those poor lost souls have not. And I am quite sure that those wretched ones say in Hell, “O accursed priest! If I had never known you, I should not be so guilty!”

No one expects our priests to have the spiritual gifts or the supernatural fortitude of the Cure d’Ars. I would never ask a priest to spend his every waking hour in the confessional, day after day. That is a unique vocation. But imagine if more priests would spend even an hour a day there. Imagine if you could take your lunch hour and visit a local parish, make a good confession, and a visit to the Blessed Sacrament. Imagine if every Sunday, before the only Mass all week that many of us have the opportunity to attend, the confessional light was on. Even if at first, no one came, how might it affect the faithful to know that the option was available to them?

Would you go to confession more often? I would.

So I make my humble plea to our priests: offer us more times for Confession. I beg our bishops: encourage your priests to do this for the faithful of your diocese. This sacrament is transformative, and we need it more than ever.

And if you are a priest or bishop who already provides frequent opportunities for Confession, thank you. If you are a parishioner and your parish provides this, thank your pastor. Thank him every time. Let him know that the sacrifice he makes to be in the confessional means the world to you. Tell him how it has brought you closer to God, and has better prepared you to receive Him in the Eucharist.

And let’s all pray for our confessors. They bear, like Christ, the heavy burden of our sins. They hear all the evil that we do, and while I’ve heard priests say they are consoled by our repentance, they and their intentions should also be supported by our intercessions. I used to always make a habit of doing my penance twice: once for my sins, and once for the priest who prescribed it. (I never told them that, lest they assign me a 54-day rosary novena.)

However you do it, let them know that you appreciate their vocation, their sacrifice, and their dedication to making the sacraments available. Then take them to Our Lord in prayer, and let Him know how much you appreciate them too.

This morning, a friend of mine who lives in Rome posted the following observation on Facebook:

Looking up at the chimney on the Sistine Chapel this morning, I began to see the problem with creating recognisably black smoke in weather like this. With the light grey of the overcast, any solid, including smoke particles, are going to show up appearing very dark in silhouette. It was obvious last night that the smoke was v. black, but in daylight, I think all the smoke they make is going to look dark grey.

But lighting questions aside, the larger question remains: how do they make the colored smoke? A longstanding mystery, yesterday the Vatican Press Office revealed the secret recipe. Henry Fountain, science writer for the New York Times explains:

The white smoke, used to announce the election of a new pope, combines potassium chlorate, milk sugar (which serves as an easily ignitable fuel) and pine rosin, Vatican officials said in a statement. The black smoke, which was used Tuesday evening to signal that no one in the first round of balloting received the necessary two-thirds vote of the 115 cardinals, uses potassium perchlorate and anthracene (a component of coal tar), with sulfur as the fuel. Potassium chlorate and perchlorate are related compounds, but perchlorate is preferred in some formulations because it is more stable and safer.

The chemicals are electrically ignited in a special stove first used for the conclave of 2005, the statement said. The stove sits in the Sistine Chapel next to an older stove in which the ballots are burned; the colored smoke and the smoke from the ballots mix and travel up a long copper flue to the chapel roof, where the smoke is visible from St. Peter’s Square.

There you have it, folks. Considering the rather formidable list of Catholic scientists throughout the ages, it comes as no surprise that even the papal conclave messaging service is just another example of better living through chemistry!

But is this really “one of the most difficult periods” in the history of the Catholic Church? I suspect Pope Pius VII would disagree as would Saint Leo the Great.

The Church has survived far worse than any of the modern-day scandals that journalists breathlessly describe as the herald of the Parousia. The Church suffered terrible atrocities in Mexico, Spain, and Germany even in the last century. To be sure, these are trying times for many reasons, but they are not the most difficult.

Via Dolorosa – The Way of Suffering

Moreover, the nature of our pilgrim journey as we follow in the footsteps of Christ is always a struggle which can lead only to one place—the foot of the cross. It is easy to be distracted by the excitement and ceremony of the Papal Conclave, but we must also remember that we are in Lent, and that pace the media accounts above, the Church is about to receive a new generation of catechumens and converts as it does every year. Lent is a time not only of personal renewal, but also renewal of the whole Church, which has been solemnly celebrated since even before the time of Christ as the purification before Passover in the Jewish tradition.

The fate of the Church will not be determined by the next pope. The fate of the Church will be determined by all of us. The Vicar of Christ is only just that. He can show us the way, but it is up to all of us to take up the cross as Simon did on the road to Golgotha. In this respect, there are encouraging signs that more people are answering that call. A long-term study by Georgetown University shows that the numbers of seminarians and priestly ordinations have actually been steadily increasing since at least 2000. The laity are also showing glimmers of hope with the percentage of those who attend Mass weekly also slowly increasing over the same time period.

It’s easy to be discouraged by the world we live in. The greatest threat we face as Christians is the indifference and dehumanization of secular liberalism. Worse still, there are no easy answers. However, the old saying that many hands make light work is especially true during these times of uncertainty and fear. As Jesus tells us in the Gospel of Matthew, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The more we take up His cross in this time of purification, the easier it will be for future generations to carry on in the constant struggle against the forces of Hell which are always seeking our ruin.

In certain Catholic circles, there has been no small amount of alarm over Pope Emeritus Benedict’s abdication, and the possible circumstances that precipitated it. Those who have always looked to Benedict as a dauntless pillar of strength in a very tumultuous period for the Church found it suspicious that he would step down from his duties unless in some way, his hand was forced. To many, he always seemed to be the sort who would carry that cross until his dying day, come what may.

Personally, I’ve never doubted that the Holy Father acted in good faith and of his own volition. Whatever else the world may think about him, there are few who would argue that he is not a man of keen intellect and tenacious adherence to principle. But this does not mean that his decision was not influenced by forces that he feared might overwhelm even his capacity to forestall.

Dr. Robert B. Moynihan, founder and editor-in-chief of Inside the Vatican magazine wrote yesterday of an encounter he had with a member of the curia that lends credence to this concern. After recognizing a certain unnamed cardinal of his acquaintance dressed in the manner of a simple clergyman on the streets of Rome, Moynihan approached him to speak a concern that had been on his mind.

“Your eminence,” I said.

In his eyes he was saying to me that he could not answer any questions.

But he was not excluding all conversation. And so I ventured…

“I only wanted to tell you one thing,” I said. “That I loved Pope Benedict.”

He stood still.

“I did too, and I do love him,” the cardinal said.

“And so I have been troubled and a bit off balance since February 11,” I said.

And then, as if filled with a sudden emotion, I saw the cardinal’s face grow dark and sad, and he said, forcefully: “I love him, but this should never have happened. He never should have left his office.”

I was silent.

“It is like a man and a woman, a husband and wife, a mother and father in relation to their children,” he said. “What do they say?” It seemed he was asking me the question.

I was silent.

“They say, ‘until death do us part!’ They stay together always.”

So I understood him to be saying that he felt a Successor of Peter should not step down from the throne, no matter how weary and tired, but continue until death.

I felt the words he was speaking were the words of an argument that may have been used even among the cardinals, but of course, that may not be the case.

But I felt that I was catching a glimpse of how at least one cardinal was thinking about the Pope’s renunciation.

“Your eminence,” I said, “I’ve forgotten. Are you already above age 80, or not?

“I am not yet 80,” he told me.

“So you will be voting tomorrow.”

He nodded, and a look passed over his eyes which seemed filled with shadows and concerns. I was surprised at his intensity. I was surprised by the whole conversation.

He squeezed my hand. “Is there anything else I can do?” I asked.

“Pray for us,” he said. “Pray for us.”

He turned as if he needed to go.

“I have to go.”

He took a step away from me, then turned again.

“It is a dangerous time. Pray for us.”

I think we should do as he asked.

It is good that we trust in the wisdom of Benedict’s decision, that we believe that whatever the reason, he knew what he was doing. But this should not put us at our ease. I believe in the very core of my being that the cardinal is right. It is a dangerous time for the Church. I can feel it. The forces of darkness are alert, and there is something afoot. What it is, we may never know. But this is far from an ordinary conclave.

In any conclave, Catholics who love the Church pray for the election of a good and holy pontiff. In this conclave, we should pray all the more, and invoke St. Michael’s intercession. Remember the reason for the prayer’s composition:

Pope Leo XIII (reigned from 1878-1903) composed the now famous “Prayer to Saint Michael” after celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with a group of cardinals. During the Mass, the Holy Father fell to the floor at the foot of the altar. It seemed that the Holy Father had died or suffered from a stroke. Suddenly, the Pope revived and said, “What a horrible vision I was allowed to see.”

Apparently the pontiff saw a future influx of demonic forces into the Catholic Church. He subsequently authored the following prayer to Saint Michael, seeking to gain further protection for the Church. Pope Leo XIII also ordered this prayer it be prayed by the priest and faithful at the end of every low Mass.

Latin
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio; contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperat illi Deus; supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae coelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude. Amen.

English:
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in the battle, be our safeguard and protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil; may God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

As a Catholic attached to the Traditional Latin Mass, I have had the privilege of seeing the old practice of praying the St. Michael prayer at the foot of the altar after every low Mass. Here in Northern Virginia, many parishes that celebrate the Novus Ordo have restored the tradition of the St. Michael prayer at the conclusion of the liturgy. If you are a pastor, I urge you to pray it with your parishioners. If you are a parent, pray it with your family. If you believe that the Devil is at work both in the world and in the Church, pray it on your own. Every day. If you want to really stick it to the Devil, pray the longer version of the prayer.

May God grant us a holy and wise pontiff. May He grant us a strong pontiff. May He grant us a better pontiff than we deserve.

Currently, there are roughly 1.1 billion Catholics around the world. That’s three times as many as there were in 1910, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

Pew’s findings, which tracked the global changes in the Catholic faith over the past 100 years, has some encouraging, and some not so encouraging, news:

As the pie chart above indicates, the sub-Saharan Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America-Caribbean regions have witnessed the largest increases in the number of Catholics, with Latin America-Caribbean now being home to 39% of all the world’s Catholics. Europe, predictably, has seen the largest percentage decrease. In 1910, 65% of all the world’s Catholics lived in Europe. Now, that number rests at a paltry 24%. Even though Catholics now make up a larger percentage of the population in North America, 1-in-10 adults in the United States identify as former Catholics, many of whom are now Protestant or unaffiliated.

If there’s one thing we can take away from Pew’s research, it’s that whoever the next pope will be, he needs to make sure Catholics in developing countries have the resources and leadership that will allow them to continue to grow the faith.

The crypt in which Elvis Presley was first buried has been withdrawn from a Los Angeles auction after protests it should be kept as a shrine.
…
Fans argued on the Elvis Matters website: “Can you imagine visiting the crypt and spend a few moments of silence, while an unknown is buried there? If the crypt is still accessible for fans, that is.”

Other items up for auction included his personal telephone, a medallion, and “an X-ray of a karate injury.”

And people really want these things to the point of spending many thousands of dollars to take possession of them. In Catholic parlance, the phone and medallion would be considered “second class relics,” because they are things Elvis wore or touched.

We Catholics like relics. Bits of bone, locks of hair, squares of fabric from clothing, personal prayer books, and other physical remains of saints. It’s one of the things that non-Catholics think is weird about us (and I’ll bet a fair number of Catholics are spooked out by it too, for that matter).

Why yes, that is the hand of St. Francis Xavier. Why do you ask?

And, in a way, I get that. Go into the Gesu in Rome and take a look at the skeletal remains of Francis Xavier’s hand in a display above the side altar in the right transept. Then walk across the nave to the little room to the right of the other transept’s side altar where literally hundreds of relics of Jesuit martyrs and saints—bones, mostly—are on display for veneration and prayer.

Even people who are not yet canonized, like Father Stanley Rother, who was murdered in Guatemala in 1981 by pro-Communist thugs for not abandoning the poverty-stricken indigenous flock he had shepherded since 1968 to their atheistic domination. His body returned to his Oklahoma home, but his heart was removed and buried where it always had been: the Guatemalan highlands.

The reason we like relics, though, is likely different. We don’t want them as mere keepsakes or reminders of the person or persons who made them special, though they are that. We also don’t want them as some sort of magical amulet that will imbue us with the powers of the deceased. That’s just weird. We want them as a spiritual connection between heaven and earth. We want them because they are intrinsically connected to a person or persons who made heaven manifest on earth. Someone who came to live in and share the love of Christ while still mucking about in the world with all its worldly allurements.

As the great St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), martyred at Auschwitz, said,

To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one’s feet on the earth, to walk on the dirty and rough paths of this earth and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father’s right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly to sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels: this is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth.

The saints did that, and since ours is an incarnational religion—God became man to redeem creation and restore it to its rightful glory—when a person, body, soul, and spirit, ascends to the lofty heights of sanctity while still on this side of the grave, the physical remains they leave behind when they do pass through death remain a spiritual connection between us and them.

Nothing is the merging of heaven and earth in the manner that the Blessed Sacrament is—that is the God-man literally enfleshed—but the reality of the sanctity of the saints imbues their earthly remains with a sanctity that we do well to remember, venerate, and associate ourselves with.

In civil society we maintain a remembrance of great (or at least influential) events and hallowed halls—Independence Hall, Monticello, Mount Vernon, Gettysburg battlefield, the Alamo, Elvis’ empty tomb, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, etc.—but not because of a spiritual connection between earth and the heavens that lives and is eternally current; but rather as a connection between our time and the times and events past that formed who we are as a nation, and a people. This is all well and good—I love visiting those places and have frequently—but it’s not the ultimate. It points to the ultimate: it is a civil, secular manifestation of that human tendency to hang onto the past so we can understand, endure, make awesome the present and avoid mistakes in the future.

But, again, this is not the ultimate. The ultimate expression of this is in the relics we Catholics venerate of those who have gone before and who marked out the path to beatitude. Those who walked the dirty and rough paths of this world, seeing the face of Christ in those whom they meet, trusting joyfully in the providence of God in every situation they endured—whether happy or sorrowful, and awaiting with patience the “morning of eternity.”

So I’m glad people were upset that Elvis’ original tomb was almost sold to the highest bidder. Elvis’ impact on our culture was profound and means something to many people. If I’m ever in the Memphis area I may stop by and offer a prayer or two for Elvis and all those affected by his music, and maybe even stop by Graceland and offer a prayer where his remains now lie. But it wouldn’t come close to being within a few feet of the bones of St. Peter in the Scavi below the baldaccino in St. Peter’s

From the University of St. Thomas:

When seminarians from the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity of the University of St. Thomas gather for their annual group photo at the start of the school year on Wednesday afternoon, Sept. 7, it will be the largest such gathering since 1980.

The seminary is welcoming 30 new graduate-level seminarians this fall, bringing the total number of men studying for the priesthood to 100. They come from 19 dioceses and institutes of consecrated life in the United States, Ghana, Uganda and Peru. Forty-three of the men are preparing to serve as priests of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Via Kuriositas:

Deep underground in Poland lies something remarkable but little known outside Eastern Europe. For centuries, miners have extracted salt there, but left behind things quite startling and unique. Take a look at the most unusual salt mine in the world.

From the outside, Wieliczka Salt Mine doesn’t look extraordinary. It looks extremely well kept for a place that hasn’t minded any salt for over ten years but apart from that it looks ordinary. However, over two hundred meters below ground it holds an astonishing secret. This is the salt mine that became an art gallery, cathedral and underground lake.

Situated in the Krakow area, Wieliczka is a small town of close to twenty thousand inhabitants. It was founded in the twelfth century by a local Duke to mine the rich deposits of salt that lie beneath. Until 1996 it did just that but the generations of miners did more than just extract. They left behind them a breathtaking record of their time underground in the shape of statues of mythic, historical and religious figures. They even created their own chapels in which to pray. Perhaps their most astonishing legacy is the huge underground cathedral they left behind for posterity.

It may feel like you are in the middle of a Jules Verne adventure as you descend in to the depths of the world. After a one hundred and fifty meter climb down wooden stairs the visitor to the salt mine will see some amazing sites. About the most astounding in terms of its sheer size and audacity is the Chapel of Saint Kinga. The Polish people have for many centuries been devout Catholics and this was more than just a long term hobby to relieve the boredom of being underground. This was an act of worship.

Amazingly, even the chandeliers in the cathedral are made of salt. It was not simply hewn from the ground and then thrown together; however, the process is rather more painstaking for the lighting. After extraction the rock salt was first of all dissolved. It was then reconstituted with the impurities taken out so that it achieved a glass-like finish. The chandeliers are what many visitors think the rest of the cavernous mine will be like as they have a picture in their minds of salt as they would sprinkle on their meals! However, the rock salt occurs naturally in different shades of grey (something like you would expect granite to look like).

Still, that doesn’t stop well over one million visitors (mainly from Poland and its eastern European neighbors) from visiting the mine to see, amongst other things, how salt was mined in the past.

A representation of Da Vinci’s Last Supper … carved out of a wall of salt:

This stunning chapel has to be my favorite:

Many more photos here.

Maybe even Lot’s wife would feel at home here.

What happens when six Dominican Novices go to the garage of St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, OH? Jazz music!

Notice the statue of St. Dominic keeps vigil as the friars play (it is being restored by one of the novices).

Watch for yourself….

There are many young dominicans who are also incredibly talented musicians. I’ve had the privilege of hearing some of their informal jam sessions take place after they host mini-retreats with young Catholics in the Washington, DC area.

If you can’t get enough, watch their rendition of “Blues For Alice.”

And if you really can’t get enough (and live near Cincinnati), check out the Riverboat Jazz Concert hosted by the Dominican Novices aboard the S.S. River Chief: Monday July 18th at 7:30 P.M.

Catholic culture – it’s a beautiful (sounding) thing.